Posted
by
timothyon Thursday January 23, 2014 @02:55PM
from the that-dog-won't-hunt dept.

cartechboy writes "Since the dawn of time (or modern civilization) two things have happened: utility companies have made money by selling us electricity, and oil companies make money by selling us gasoline. But is it possible we are on the verge of upsetting this status quo? Tony Seba, an entrepreneur and lecturer at Standford University, is writing a book in which he essentially predicts electric cars and solar power will make gasoline and utilities obsolete by 2030. How, you might ask? In his book, titled Disrupting Energy: How Silicon Valley Is Making Coal, Nuclear, Oil And Gas Obsolete, he predicts that as people buy electric cars the interest in clean energy will increase because who wouldn't want 'free travel'? Combining the use of solar panels and electric cars, consumers would be able to do just that. The miles electric cars travel on grid energy stored in their batteries eliminates the demand for gasoline, and it turns out many electric-car owners have solar panels on their homes while eliminates or dramatically reduces their dependence on utilities. So as the amount of electric cars on the road increases, the cost of both solar panels electric-car battery packs will decrease, right?"

Put the most efficient solar panel possible covering 5000 square feet at the latitude of Washington D.C. - tell me how many miles a year you can drive after you have used that solar power to heat and cool your home?

Some people need to get a grip - I mean, there are these multi-rotor hovercraft springing up all over the place, how long before we are all driving them to work on 7 layer freeways in the air?

Put the most efficient solar panel possible covering 5000 square feet at the latitude of Washington D.C. - tell me how many miles a year you can drive after you have used that solar power to heat and cool your home?

Some people need to get a grip - I mean, there are these multi-rotor hovercraft springing up all over the place, how long before we are all driving them to work on 7 layer freeways in the air?

There's another trend in modern life, toward zero land ownership.

Put the most efficient solar panel possible covering 5000 square feet at the latitude of Washington D.C. - tell me how many miles a year you can drive after you have used that solar power to heat and cool your home?

Some people need to get a grip - I mean, there are these multi-rotor hovercraft springing up all over the place, how long before we are all driving them to work on 7 layer freeways in the air?

I don't know the average power usage of a home in Washington DC. But let's say that the home uses an average of 1000KWh/month, and that they want to charge their 24KWh car 3 times a week, for 12 charges/month, or around 300KWh, so that means they need to generate 1300KWh/month.

According to this solar calculator [findsolar.com], such a system in Washington DC would require 1100 sq ft of roof space, and cost $68,000 before incentives, or $24,000 after incentives. It would save nearly $200/month in electric bills, and is esti

Even if there were enough renewables, no one is going to be able to generate enough solar energy individually to power an automobile effectively. Unless you were a rancher and had plenty of land for solar panels. Otherwise cover a small condo's roof with panels and you won't have enough energy for both the car and the home. Then there are cloudy days which is where you'll need to use the utilities to keep the electric car powered enough to go to work.

The Tesla model S has a base battery capacity of 60kWh for a 208 mile range, or 3.46 miles/kWh Each square yard of well positioned budget solar panel generates around 200 Wh/day, weather permitting. A 1000 square foot flat-roof house could support up to 111 solar panels for 22kWh per day - enough to travel about 77 miles. That looks entirely workable for a lot of situations to me, I know a lot of people that don't drive even a quarter of of that on a daily basis.

In less optimal situations where your panels can't keep up with your driving and home habits, you could still be reducing your power bill. In fact that might be an even better situation - Solar in the US will typically pay for itself in 5 years regardless of system size, unless you have really cheap electricity or a poor climate for it. Excess power generation though typically goes to waste - your batteries can't store it and you usually don't get a rebate on grid tied systems, and that means the system takes longer to pay for itself.

In my 1000 square foot house I spend $1000 a year on electricity. How exactly would I pay for $15K - $20K worth of solar cells in 5 years?

At that price, you would be looking at a 15-20 kW system. You would also have a hard time fitting that many solar panels on a 1000 square foot house, unless you redesigned the roof specifically for solar. A more realistic estimate for your house would be $5-6k for a 5 kW system.

I guess I could go all electric, which would cost me another $5 in appliances.

A new 40 gallon electric water heater goes for $240 and a new freestanding electric range goes for $350 at Lowes. A new electric heat pump (Air Conditioner/Heater) would be a bit more, but still well under $5k (I'm assuming you meant five thousand with your $5 number)

I might break even in 15 years, about the time I would need to replace the solar cells.

Modern panels decrease their output by less than one half of one percent per year, often with a warranty backing up their claims. For example, the SunPower X-Series solar panel warranty guaranties a less than 0.4% decline per year for 25 years. So at 15 years, you are looking at panels that are still producing at least 94% of their original capacity - hardly needing replacement.

By then they should be cheeper and more efficient. So yea by about 2030 solar would probably take care of my needs.

Solar panels will continue to get cheaper (a few cents per watt) as production scales up. They will also get a bit more efficient (a few percent) as manufacturing processes improve. However, don't plan on any disruptive technology advancements to occur in the next 15 years that fundamentally change how home solar installations work.

> I wonder if it's better to put the emphasis on reducing energy use in the home rather than on the automobile.

The reason that doesn't work as well is(1) people have moving towards more energy efficient appliances, etc for quite a while - going much further would require a change of lifestyle, and causing those intentionally seems to require either invasive mandates or a massive organized cultural blitz. Neither of which would go over well in the US. Besides which cars are responsible for about 30% of US CO2 emissions, while IIRC households are closer to 15%, or maybe 5, I forget exactly.

(2) Cars are horribly inefficient - a well tuned power plant can burn fuel at ~50% efficiency, a car is typically doing good to get into the 25-30% range.

(3) power plant emissions can be scrubbed to extract as much CO2 and pollutants as mandated, while short of putting frequently replaced exhaust filters in your car it can't do much better than having a catalytic converter to finish burning some of the more noxious intermediate byproducts.

There's also a second, longer-term advantage to moving to electric vehicles. A gasoline engine can only ever run on gasoline, but an EV will run on whatever the power plants are using. Coal, solar, nuclear, wind, you name it, it all makes the same kind of electricity. That allows us to, at a later date, shift much more quickly to alternate energy sources, without the 20+ year lag as new car technology percolates down to the second-hand masses.

Are you telling me that you don't see the technology improving? There is still lots of room for solar cells to improve. In addition batteries are also getting better by the minute. Combine better solar efficiency for less money with better storage capacity and you have yourself a neat power plant on the roof of your house. Add to this more efficient electronics and it's whole order ball game.

For residential use, solar energy is very plausible. My neighbour had a portion of his roof covered and it cost him less than $30 000. He generated 720 KW in the month of November which was mostly cloudy. At 15 cents per KW that's a $108 saving. Not bad for a cloudy month.

Although I think that 2030 is far too optimistic to see large power plants replaced with clean self generated energy, I believe it's going to happen sooner than you think.

The kind of status-quo-maintaining garbage you are spouting is nothing short of deliberate evil, given what a careful read of the relevant scientific literature would tell you. If we check back in 2025 and find the warming continuing, do you give us permission to banish you to the island of Vanuatu, where you can sink or swim on the strength of your convictions?

"In 2012, National Science Board member James Lawrence Powell investigated peer-reviewed literature published about climate change and found that out of 13,950 articles, 13,926 supported the reality of global warming. Despite a lot of sound and fury from the denial machine, deniers have not really been able to come up with a coherent argument against a consensus."

For once, I disagree with Betteridge's law of headlines. Yes, solar power will eventually obsolete all other forms for non-industrial use. But don't hold your breath.

For non-transport use, we could really switch to solar-thermal today (not photoelectric cells, but the less efficient black pipe, mirror, and turbine solution). It's simply more expensive than other power sources, and storing power for overnight use is still more expensive so we don't. It's pretty close though - I believe the cost of power would less than double that way, and while that would be a massive economic catastrophe (the cost of power matters a lot), it does set a long-term cap on power pricing.

Transportation is different, however. We're a long way from having batteries that are safe and good enough, at any sort of reasonable price, and even if we had those it would be an infrastructure replacement to support the change, which is a multi-decade process (don't kid yourself, people would charge their cars during the day too). Since all that's required is ordinary technological process, the change to electric cars will inevitably happen, but over the course of several decades. Personally, I don't see a problem with that (peak oil nuts aside, at current prices the supply is much larger than we'll need).

And if batteries get good enough and cheap enough, home solar thermal might start making a lot more sense. Even if it doesn't quite pay for itself, I'd pay a premium to be off the power grid.

All that being said, industrial power is a different story, but it's not like we have supply problems with natural gas either, and surely fusion power will only be "20 years away" for another century or two, right?

Batteries are already safer than fuel tanks. The only problem here is the manipulation of public perception regarding battery safety. Already we have efforts underway to undermine that perception.

What I would be on the look out for is an industry trend away from fossil fuels and on to hydrogen. It allows the present players to maintain their roles as suppliers of energy while looking like the good guys. After all hydrogen is "green, its byproduct is just water" and "renewables--while important an important part of our energy strategy--can never possibly supply our need for reliable energy." Of course we consumers certainly can't produce our own energy because that's just dangerous. Leave that to the professionals.

Batteries are already safer than fuel tanks. The only problem here is the manipulation of public perception regarding battery safety. Already we have efforts underway to undermine that perception

Energy-dense, safe, cheap: pick 2 (at most). If you imagine some conspiracy to undermine public perception (beyond the normal sensationalism of the media), you should go back on your meds. The big energy companies will make their profits either way.

What I would be on the look out for is an industry trend away from fossil fuels and on to hydrogen.

Hydrogen is only practical to store and transport as a palladium-family hydride. While that gives very dense and very safe power storage, those metals aren't cheap: like a catalytic converter, it would take $100-200 just for the metal. You can actually make this "pumpable" with small palladium spheres, allowing existing gas infrastructure to be used for transport (the DoE patented the details during the Bush years, effectively protecting it as public domain), but the used palladium will need to be returned (like a battery swap) and the prospect for fraud there likely dooms the whole system.

Yes, solar power will eventually obsolete all other forms for non-industrial use.

Easily and demonstrably not true unless you invoke as-yet undeveloped technology of uncertain viability. I think solar is terrific and should be used much more but it's not a cure all solution for every energy problem.

For non-transport use, we could really switch to solar-thermal today (not photoelectric cells, but the less efficient black pipe, mirror, and turbine solution). It's simply more expensive than other power sources, and storing power for overnight use is still more expensive so we don't.

No we could not. Even if the technology were adequate (it isn't - we don't have adequate battery technology) the economics of it are prohibitive. When I say cost prohibitive I don't just mean that it is a little more expensive. I mean that given the current state of the technology the cost

This whole topic sounds like some sort of acid-induced hippie fantasy, taking place in some alternate universe where solar power has become several orders of magnitude more widespread and efficient than in our world, producing enough electricity to not only power our homes, but also our factories, infrastructure, cars, etc.--and all with super-efficient storage to get us all that through nights and cloudy days too.

It sounds like a wonderful world, but it's not ours. And for MANY, MANY reasons, it never could be.

Not an alternate universe, but a planet closer to the sun. With current panels, you get around 100-200W per square metre of sunlight. The theoretical maximum efficiency for solar panels is somewhere around 40%, bringing it up to 400W. Over 8 hours a day of useable sunlight (that's the output with the sun directly overhead, it slowly drops off over the day, giving an average of around 8 hours, assuming good weather). So that gives a total of around 11.5MJ per day. One litre of petrol releases around 34M

There are two issues, with home solar.Issue 1. Upfront cost. Solar panels are getting cheaper, however labor rates to install them will only get higher. So it will be a fair investment to get them installed in your home.

Issue 2. Trees. I live in Upstate NY, we have these 30-100 foot tall trees that blocks a lot of the sunlight. We could cut them down... however is it worth it cutting down our best method to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, in order to use less carbon?

Lets say it takes them 8 hours to rig up your home, they will need 2 people. Include 0.5 hour travel time, and 3 hours of administration 20 Man hours, they will probably be at say $50 an hour Pay and benefits. That is $1,000. You are also assuming that the number of workers will grow faster then the demand for solar panels. I doubt that will be the case, the demand for panels will probably be higher then the number of workers, thus their rates would go up. Efficiency in ins

I have an electric car, and solar panels. The answer is still no. My electric car is so efficient that it's not the largest component of my electric bill. I have gas cooking, heating, and hot water; and the electric bill is three times the car bill, in December. In the hot summers, the AC can kick the daylights out of the Tesla in terms of power consumption.
By the way, electric car travel is NOT FREE. There is significant capital expense, just another way of financing energy usage. My solar panels spread this capital cost over their usage period (I pay an "electric bill" for the solar power I use). It's all just a financing shell game. You can make one number $0, but you can't make them all $0. As folks have said, they want to charge my electric car a "gas tax" to pay for the roads. They even want it to make noise, so kids and folks don't walk in front of it.
None of this transportation power shuffling does anything about industrial power consumption. You're not going to like the price of aluminum foil made with solar electricity. High power industries need the high power density low cost power that renewables can't provide.

Even if they get the batteries working great, which I hope they do, we'll still most likely charge our cars over the grid. Maintaining huge arrays of solar panels is done more efficiently at a utility level than on our rooftops. In the end, solar may revolutionize the energy sector, but I suspect we'll still buy our power from our local utilities.

No kidding. They'll tax the hell out of electricity to make up for lost gasoline taxes...nothing is free...

So, a little thought experiment, because this is about solar.

I buy some solar panels, or they're built into my car. From there, I never use your electricity, I use my electricity. And, if I own the solar infrastructure, the energy is free, give or take my investment and maintenance costs.

So either you're going to heavily tax the solar panels under the guise that it denies you the opportunity to tax me later. Or you're going to tax me on the basis that I have solar power, which denies you the opportunity to tax me.

If you start taxing people on the basis of things they're not doing, or for failure to consume those things from a company which charges you... then the MPAA is going to insist on taxing me based on the movies I don't see, because after all, I'm clearly the reason your movie didn't make any money, because I didn't pay to see it. And McDonald's will want to tax me for all their crappy food I don't eat. The Saudi's will insist I be taxed because I'm not using oil, so I'm depriving them of revenue.

I just don't see your system working. If I have a stand-alone solar array, and I charge my car with it using none of your resources -- on what basis do you think you can tax me? Because you feel entitled to it?

If we reach a point where people can charge their own cars with their own solar panels, suddenly there is free energy, and nothing on which to tax people, and no revenue for companies.

Which is why many people believe the energy companies will actively prevent this from happening.

No, they will tax you under the guise that production and disposal of the solar panels creates large amounts of pollution. This costs money to take care of and you should be happy to pay it, you really dont want to pollute the planet do you?

"They'll come at you sideways. It's how they think. It's how they move. Sidle up and smile. Hit you where you're weak." -- -Shepherd Book (Serenity)

I thought Obamacare is the examplar of taxing people for things that they are not doing. This was made entirely clear by chief justice Roberts. Taxing your for something you don't do has already started.

They can still tax you on miles driven, for using the roads. You could fill out an online form every month and pay the necessary taxes. Where I live, your license plate has a sticker on it you have to renew every year. They could check your odometer against your monthly self reporting numbers to ensure you aren't lying. pretty simple really. They could also build it into the car. Have the car self report it's mileage over the cellular networks (or your home wifi network) every so often whenever it can find a signal. Then they can just send you a bill every month.

In Texas all new highways will be privatized toll roads thanks to crony capitalism. Never mind that roads are natural monopolies the Republican lead Texas state legislature thinks it is a wonderful idea to confiscate private land and lease it corporations for 50-100 years who will then charge commuters per mile royalties with guaranteed profits backed by the government. In metropolitan areas the toll rolls will fluctuate based on traffic conditions. Near free energy for transportation would be wonderful but

What's the difference between spending 5 minutes at a gas station and 5 minutes at a super-charger every 300-400 miles? Realistically though, unless you're a truck or taxi driver you should rarely have to ever care about the range remaining even with the present generation. Plug it in where/whenever you park it.

How often do you take cross-country trips? For me, it's at most once or twice per year - renting a vehicle for those times is no problem, especially if my daily driver is cheaper to operate. If you do take such trips frequently, then present EVs are not for you. However, you're among a small minority of the driving population.

By requiring your daily driver to be capable of any situation you can imagine - even if it occurs very infrequently - you're wasting a lot of resources, including your own money.

Gas cars are terribly efficient. Even with 100% efficiency the carnot cycle limits efficiency of an ICE to around 30%, tack in all the other inefficiencies in the system and you only need to store about 20% of the energy in a gallon of gas to equal the people and goods moving power of a gasoline powered car. The current round of L-Ion batteries are almost there and there are improvements on the horizon that will both improve energy density and lower cost. Frankly it's a matter of time at this point until electric cars begin to be both and the price and range of the vast majority of users.

Personally I don't think the articles prediction of 2030 to reach that point is out of bounds of reality. Solar city is adding 15 employees a week to install solar panels. Most people don't realize what that means. Solar panel costs (total costs, including installation and maintenance) have hit price parity with utility grid power over an amortized 10 year lifetime. We are on the brink of a solar revolution.

His prediction is that battery cost and solar panel cost will drop so much that by 2030, it will be worth it.

He mainly seems interested in cost per kWh. He says, "Once it gets to $US100/kWh [in batteries], it is all over." He is predicting that will happen by 2030. Obviously there are other factors that matter beyond cost, but it makes sense that once batteries are cheaper than gasoline, a lot of people will buy them. Toyota Corollas are popular, and not because of their acceleration.

I don't understand this kind of argument. What would have happened when automobiles were first invented if someone said:

Show me a car that can reproduce by itself, and only needs to be fuelled with grass that I grow on my own fields for free, and then maybe we'll talk.

An electric car does not need to match all of the performance specifications of a gasoline-powered car. All it has to do is meet the needs of the consumers. And if you sat down and thought about it, you probably don't _need_ the things you listed. Those are specifications derived from your actual requirements, under the assumption that a car is gasoline-powered.

If solar cells become efficient enough, then the charge speed is infinite/continuous, and free after the purchase of the vehicle. Gas can't beat that, ever.

I can fit about a square metre of solar cells on top of my car. In ideal conditions, with 100% efficient conversion, that's about 1kW. The Volt's battery capacity is apparently 16kWh, so, in theory, in perfect conditions, the panel could charge the battery enough while I'm at work to give me the power to drive home. I'd still have to plug it in there. It still wouldn't provide enough power for long highway trips, or on overcast days. Or for people who work at night.

Who lumped nuclear in there? As long as a nuclear plant has US standards for quality and testing instead of Japanese standards, we're all set. I do still prefer solar and wind but I wouldn't lump nuclear in with oil and gas since it doesn't produce CO2.

As long as a nuclear plant has US standards for quality and testing instead of Japanese standards, we're all set.

Fukushima Daiichi had four General Electric reactors. The same reactor design is used in several US plants. Peach Bottom [wikipedia.org] in Pennsylvania is one. All operating plants of that design will melt down if they lose cooling water flow for more than about 18 hours.

Contrary to the write-up, civilization has not been using oil (nor gas) very much for centuries. Man has sailed with, well, sails for thousands of years.

However, when the opportunity arose, using Sun's concentrated energy proved rather attractive to all. And so it will remain until we find a way to stuff the comparable amounts of energy per unit of volume as the "fossil fuels" contain.

Will we some day go all electric? Probably.Is it going to happen any time soon?Fuck no!Petroleum is still too (relatively) cheap and still far better in the energy density department.Additionally, the infrastructure just isn't there to make electric viable enough yet.MAYBE 50-100 years from now.But right now we're comparing Orville and Wilbur Wright against an F-35 Lightning II.Of COURSE it's going to be found wanting...

The key here is the question specifically about *solar* power. When you look at the sum total amount of energy we consume, I think you'll find that you'd have to blanket a pretty significant portion of the usable surface of the earth with panels to provide all of it, if you went strictly solar.

(From a solar energy FAQ):Q: How much roof space is needed?A: A rule of thumb is 100 sq. ft. per every kilowatt (kW) of electricity the PV system produces. Module efficiency correlates with the power that is generated in a given amount of roof space. For basic planning purposes, a good rule of thumb is 10-12 watts per square foot.

10-12 watts of power generated per square foot just isn't a heck of a lot, in the grand scheme of things.

You have to couple that with the fact that battery storage isn't anywhere near 100% efficient. (Batteries "leak" power even when they sit idle for a while.)

I think electric cars will have growing usefulness, but not everyplace gets a lot of sunshine during the average day. So even companies setting up solar charging stations in parking spaces for people to plug in vehicles during the work day won't be an adequate solution everywhere.

Ultimately, I see a situation where we substitute some fossil fuel use for increased nuclear power (for the big energy generation happening at large power plants), some hydrogen fuel cell tech gaining acceptance, solar and batteries as supplemental power where applicable, a little wind energy (again where applicable), and in the shorter-term at least, more use of natural gas vs. oil or coal.

The key here is the question specifically about *solar* power. When you look at the sum total amount of energy we consume, I think you'll find that you'd have to blanket a pretty significant portion of the usable surface of the earth with panels to provide all of it, if you went strictly solar.

Yes you would.

Fortunately, we already blanket a pretty significant portion of the earth with buildings, roads and parking lots. Put solar on all the buildings and cover the parking lots and you are well over half of the way there.

NREL states we would need 00.4% of all the land in the USA to go 100% solar electric. The report uses existing PV efficiencies. By the time we could possibly be near something like 100%, efficiencies will b

Solar and wind energy are not producing energy all the time. When there is no wind, wind turbine will not produce energy. When it is night, solar will not produce energy.Storing energy is quite difficult and ineeficient. So it is not realistic to stay we will store solar energy for when it is night.The energy consumption is not constant over time, you need to be able to deliver the proper amount of energy at any time. This is why nuclear power plant did not make coal power plant obsolete. Because starting a

Just at the point that becomes true, flying cars* will change everything and we'll be fuel-hungry again for every last source.

Maybe the oil industry will finally do the R&D needed to get flying cars* up if they see their revenue drying up. They have the deep pockets for R&D, unlike Joe Garage Tinkerer. Gaining future markets is a mild motivator for R&D, but rescuing a dying cash cow is a huge motivator.

I've always seen our relationship with fossil fuels as a duel edged sword. First edge, they are the only reason we live in the advanced world we currently do. No oil or coal, no modern living as we now know.

But, they are a finite resource. Oil is what I worry about the most (if you buy into abiotic oil I've got quite a few bridges you may be interested in, on sale this week).

The other edge of the sword is the fact that we are fully dependent on fossil fuels. If alternative energy resources are not devel

It seems the vast majority of professional chefs and most home cooks prefer to cook with gas. Electric ranges aren't as quick to turn on and off, and stay hot longer, so they're slightly more dangerous.

Thinking seriously about adding a solar panel + inverter + storage option for electric car charging and air conditioning, my biggest electricity usage needs. Each of these could be interrupted briefly for switchover to power company feeds without degradation in service, unlike using the solar electricity for normal household power.
Since we live in an area that has abundant sunshine and high electric costs, this would seem to me to be the low-hanging fruit for solar electricity and would avoid policy and

Would digital media make real media obsolete? No, it is still charged as real media. Laws accomodate to make sure that the ones that really makes the law keeps their profit, no matter what happens. If they feel threatened there are other ways to action [wikipedia.org]

We are currently at today's forcasted high temp of 5 deg. F (-21 deg. C) here in the middle of the US, not even taking into effect the 20+ mph wind. I feel sorry for the people trying to use electric heat for homes or businesses on days like today. I wonder how many solar panels I would need at my house today to still have any juice left over to turn on the lights, TV, or a computer.

Make that massively deployed. We need to start thinking about renewable energy sources that will deliver not only just enough energy but fucktons of it (it's a technical term.) Energy to desalinate water for cities, drill tunnels to link the continents with supersonic rail, launch vehicles into space using maglev, scrub the atmosphere, plasma-burn our poisonous waste, air-condition our domed cities, and all those other "big science" ideas that we'd be doing if we weren't waiting for fusion energy to finally

Many years ago, ice was very expensive and rare. It was cut from frozen lakes in the north and was shipped all over. [wikipedia.org] Unimaginable now, and not everyone could have ice. Then, refrigeration came along and anyone, anywhere could have virtually unlimited ice for just the price of a machine, the cost of its maintenance, and electricity and water. Being able to preserve food (and medicine) is one of the single biggest contributors to lifespan and overall quantity of life the planet has ever seen. Being able to keep things arbitrarily and efficiently cool is also a key component of many manufacturing processes. Or anything else we currently take for granted -- imagine Google trying to keep their servers cool with harvested ice!

But what if the ice companies of the past were as powerful as the energy companies of today? What if they got laws passed that made creating your own ice just as expensive as the older, horribly inefficient methods, for no reason other than "we're rich and we want to stay that way, but we don't want to have to compete with progress"? Imagine if it was prohibitively expensive to buy a refrigerator, and illegal or expensive to make your own. Where would we, as a society and a planet, be?

I'm implying that solar panels are hilariously stupid and the worst solution to a problem.

In major installations, they're inefficient as living fuck. you can do much better with parabolic concentrators, solar towers, the like. Shiny flat glass is not only inefficient, but fragile.

In minor installations, they're expensive as living fuck, inconvenient (eventually you'll need to repair that roof...), and have dodgy ROI. Oh and better add on insurance--a 15 panel installation here has no less than 5 damaged panels, 3 of which are completely destroyed. Nobody else has solar. With long ROI, the risk of just coming out negative is so high.

Solar water heat: evacuated tube collectors into a tank. Hell, in general, a solar collector--a trombe wall on the roof, evacuated tubes, whatnot--with an insulated pipeline circulating to a solar mass (a concrete, water-filled, or beeswax box packed inside massive insulation, about the size of a chest freezer if you use beeswax but that shit is expensive as silver!) is a lot more effective. You can pipe the collected energy to water heating, space heating, space cooling, and even to electricity generation using a sterling engine (potentially you could use a high-temperature heat pump to achieve cooking and high temperatures for more efficient heat-engine power generation, same concept as a solar tower).

Advantage? In the case of evacuated tubes, extreme simplicity, low cost, ease of management, lower hazards, fast ROI (less than a year). A trombe wall on the roof has the disadvantage of being fixed, but the advantage of being fixed as well: the roof builds up over top of that part, containing insulation (You don't want your heat to radiate back out) and all the elements of a roof. It can be used for just space heating, or used as an isolated minor thermal mass and collector for a basement-stored thermal mass used to drive thermal equipment (water heater, space heating, sterling generator, thermal cooling, etc.). The disadvantage is weight--it's going to be a big piece of 2 inch thick concrete on your roof--and the complexity of insulated plumbing.

Direct heating and thermal cooling reduce the number of transformations and increase efficiency of utilizing collected solar power. Solar energy used for space heating comes in as thermal energy (light) and is moved as thermal energy to space heat at near 100% efficiency. Solar energy used for cooling comes as thermal energy and is used to drive a thermal air conditioner (like those natural gas ACs that are all the rage now). Solar energy used to generate electricity is piped through a sterling engine to achieve 38% energy extraction as electricity instead of 19% or less.

And then you need to consider mass core geothermal plants, non-disruptive hydroelectric (as opposed to disruptive), wind, quantum-newtonian-oscillation generators, and of course the storage mechanisms like FTL gasodiesel manufactured from atmosphere using excess electricity.

1. One reason oil and coal appear to be cheaper is that the costs of CO2 emissions are completely externalized. Introduce a cap-and-trade system or a CO2 tax and suddenly those won't look quite as economically attractive. (Obviously, you'll have to ignore this point if you think that there are no costs of CO2 emissions, as some do.)2. Another cost of oil that is mostly externalized and doesn't apply to solar are the military efforts to secure access to oil drilling locations. Again, less oil, less need for military ventures overseas that cost ridiculously large amounts of taxpayer money.3. The cost per KwH for solar installations has been dropping steadily. That means that the capital investment that oil and gas are competing is going down, the time needed to pay back the investment in electric bill savings is dropping, which means more people will opt for solar panels, regardless of what happens to other markets.4. There's a libertarian argument to be made here: If you have your own solar power plant that can power your house, then you don't need the heavily regulated utility companies. A power plant that doesn't exist has no government regulatory agency and the staff of bureaucrats that go with it. So by extension, you're reducing your own reliance on the government.5. Even without addressing points 1 and 2, the cost of accessing oil has been going up over the long-term. That's going to affect demand sooner-or-later and push people towards alternatives.

It's sane, but I don't think it will happen by 2030. There's just too much money to be made in not having widespread solar power that I doubt we'll see a changeover anytime soon. And I'd expect homes to be converted before cars, since we know how to get a solar-powered home that works well, but electric cars have limits that are currently not as easy to adjust to.

1. My solar panels on my roof give power to the utility company, not to charge my car. I then suck power from the grid at night from excess capacity of the power grid, who generates this power using -- yes, you know the answer -- oil, gas and coal, along with some hydro. Now it's not all bad -- the power I supply via solar panels reduces the need to build new power plants to support peak needs, but still, they are using oil, gas, coal and hydro to produce my electricity for my car (and house).

2. I can generate a lot more solar power than people farther north and those who live with crappy weather. But I still can't generate it at night when I need it. Almost no one is deploying solar panels and storing the energy locally, so this feature article is a bunch of hooey, as much as I wish it not to be.

The problem with electric cars is the battery: high weight, limited capacity and thus range, hazardous materials which make replacement and disposal a headache. But, electric cars don't really need a battery, they need a source of electric power. Turbine engines run a lot cleaner than piston engines, have better fuel efficiency and run on a much wider variety of fuels, the problem was always stepping down the shaft speed to something a physical driveline could use. It's a lot easier, though, to run a generator at the high RPMs a turbine shaft naturally runs at, and a generator supplies electric power. I get the feeling the next step won't be pure-electric cars, but a hybrid with the conventional piston engine replaced by a small turbine and generator. That would reduce the demand for high-priced fuels, and also reduce the size of battery packs since you'd only need one with a ~20 mile range to cover short hops where it wouldn't be efficient to spin up the turbine.

Turbine start would be easy: any generator is in principle also a motor, and since with no fuel being burned the turbine shaft isn't under load it shouldn't take too much power to spin it up enough to start. I'd imagine this'd make them really popular in northern latitudes where getting cars started in the winter is a bear. A turbine would be easier to start, plus would immediately start providing heat for the interior and defrosting.

You definitely need a decent battery acting as a capacitor in the loop. Have you heard of turbo lag? Cars with turbo supercharging act with a lag when you press the pedal. And you will get the lag in both directions, i.e. you let off the gas, and the turbine will take considerable time to realize the fact and spin down!

But small portable gas turbines are not likely to be more efficient than diesels. Case in point, small boats and ships still use diesels, not gas turbines. If gas turbines were efficient th

Turbines really don't do well with stops and starts, particularly when hot. If you could setup a system where the turbine ran continuously for a longish period and then shut down for a full cool down cycle: then yes, I think it might be a good match...but in general that load pattern doesn't match very well with automobile transportation. Perhaps batteries really are large enough now to make that work.

My experience with turbines has been that startup is always a risky operation and that every start has a small but real chance of causing catastrophic failure. Its hard for me to imagine they'll ever be robust enough for mass market use in something like an automobile....but who knows, technology is always getting better.

From what I've seen, the Tesla uses a LOT of electric power to charge. If you drive it during the day you won't be charging it at your home solar installation.

If I need to recoup 60 miles of range per night, I need 20kWh of power at night. Assuming perfect storage efficiency, I need something like 135 square meters of solar just to keep a minimal driving distance on my car. None of this says anything about my actual power consumption in my home, which might double my total solar area or larger once you factor in inefficiencies. At this point, I've already tripled the square footage of my actual roof space and am starting to approach something like half of my entire lot size.

I also live in Minnesota, so I could probably increase all this by a third to account for the lack of sunlight in the winter.

I think it will take a factor of 10 improvement in batteries and solar panel efficiencies to make any of this possible.

Flywheels suspended in magnetic bearings spinning in vacuum have great duty cycle, fast charge/discharge times and very good efficiency. They interface beautifully with a motor/generator for charging and discharging. No chemicals or strange materials. Their main disadvantage is the angular momentum makes putting it in a car a little difficult. They can pack batteries in twin-packs with opposite spin to cancel the angular momentum. But greater danger is accidents. The containment is very poor. The heavy flywheel spinning at some 400,000 rpm delicately balanced in magnetic bearings would literally, yes literally not figuratively, explode in an accident. But for home use, you can bury it underground below some six inches of concrete. This can act as a super large capacitor to store the solar energy of night use and for cloudy days. UT Austin demonstrated a 50 Kwh storage unit.

Industry uses enormous amounts of electricity. You're not going to have your fancy electric cars and solar panels without the factories to process the ore, manufacture the chemicals, fabricate the raw component parts and assemble the product. United States electrical energy usage for aluminum production alone is 45,700 GWh per annum (U.S. Energy Requirements for Aluminum Production, U.S. DOE, 2007). There will continue to be demand for an electric utility.

I read it just fine. Started off just like the books I read to my kids at night "once upon a time...." there was this magical land where solar was economical and worked 24/7 and every nation on the planet jumped on board and there was no more pollution ever. The end.

That's ridiculous. I live in Massachusetts, and we have a solar array that generates roughly half our annual electricity needs. If our house were oriented with solar in mind when it was constructed, we could easily generate enough for all our needs and our driving needs.

Granted, that doesn't take into account our use of natural gas for heating, but if we had a geothermal system, it would.

The problem is that solar power is not a factor when houses are designed.

So let's say your sci-fi roof has 90% efficient solar panels and you live in an area with low sunlight. (3.5*160)*0.9=622.22KWh per day. So unless your house is also an aluminum smelting plant you're very, very wrong.

It seems you are yet another person who thinks the primary purpose of "green" cars is to save their owners money. I don't know why that myth won't die. Their actual purpose is to reduce impact on the environment, at basically any cost to the owner. They're actually intended to address a whole different issue than you and many Americans apparently think they do.

Oh yes you are. Several states are already looking at implementing an extra tax specifically only on electric & hybrid vehicles because those people aren't paying "their fair share" of the gas tax (even though in nearly all states, collected gas tax doesn't actually get spent on roads, which was the justification used for its introduction).

The IRS already knows that the vast majority of motorists are already used to and semi-OK with paying at least $n per mile. If enough people find a way to pay less than n (say because they aren't buying gas any more), the government finds ways to get its greedy hands on your cost savings instead of you. They just introduce a new tax on the cost-saving method itself to bring its net cost up to n again. (the level most people have already shown they will put up with). Consequently they eliminate any financial benefit to making changes in the status quo. Thats why many people will still be driving gas cars decades from now.

The fact that the government aren't providing any new or improved service to the people they collect the new tax from is not exactly going to keep them awake at night either.

Therefore, if we want the roads to start paying for themselves, we'll need to raise the gas tax, increase other taxes or fees, and/or allow some roads to return to nature so we no longer have to maintain them.

Have you ever driven a Tesla Model S? I reckon you'd be surprised at the instant torque, acceleration, safety, and silentness. Even if you have infinite money and don't care about the environment much, maintenance and noise is still a pain, along with the general poor air quality in busy cities, and those are factors which are drastically improved with an EV.

Not sure what you're referring to as "West", but if we look at California, the Tesla is no where near the best selling car. Prius is number 1, followed by the Civic, Accord, and Camry. Also the Prius is not an electric vehicle, it's a hybrid that still requires gasoline.
Regardless Tesla's or Prius's still need roads and parking so I'm not sure how to interpret your last statement .